Hawk Poop: Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know

What do you want to know about hawk poop? Maybe you have never really thought much about the fecal matter of hawks before. Perhaps you think this is a weird thing to even discuss. However, people have studied animal excrement for a very long time. Trackers pay close attention to animal scat on the trail, and scientists carefully examine animal feces to better understand different species. You can tell a lot about an animal from the waste it leaves behind. So, let’s learn all about hawk poop, and get to know these amazing birds a little bit better.

What Do Hawks Eat?

To truly understand anything about an animal’s excrement, you must first know about what the animal eats. For instance, it is usually easy to differentiate coyote and domestic dog feces on a nature trail, because the former will have considerable amounts of fur from the wild mammals that they eat. Likewise, the better we understand what a hawk eats, the more we will know about its poop.

All hawks are predators. Collectively, hawks eat everything from insects and carrion to mammals, reptiles, and other birds. However, each type of hawk tends to specialize in particular prey. Their diet relates to where they live, how they hunt, and even to their anatomy.

Buteos

Buteos are hawks that typically live in more open areas. They tend to hunt over fields and pastures, near roadways, and in other open spaces. You may spot a buteo soaring high in the sky or sitting on top of a pole or in a tree as you drive down the road. The red-tailed hawk is one of the most frequently seen buteos. This extremely common hawk ranges over most of North America. Some other buteos include red-shouldered hawks, Swainson’s hawks, ferruginous hawks, broad-winged hawks, and rough-legged hawks.

Buteos typically eat rabbits and rodents, such as rats, mice, voles, squirrels, ground squirrels, and prairie dogs. Depending on their habitat, they may also eat lizards, snakes, frogs, crabs, insects, and occasionally smaller birds. Some buteos also consume carrion.

Accipiters

Accipiters are hawks that tend to live deeper in forested areas. While buteos soar high in the sky and swoop down on prey, accipiters fly acrobatically through the forest, weaving their way through the trees with amazing precision. Accipiters may seem less familiar, because they typically don’t place themselves out in open areas where they can be easily seen. Nearly 50 accipiter species live all around the world. Accipiters native to North America include Cooper’s hawks, sharp-shinned hawks, and American goshawks.

Accipiters do eat small mammals. However, they prefer songbirds as their primary prey. Given their amazing agility and speed, accipiters can easily chase and overcome other birds in the forest.

Parabuteos

The Harris’s hawk, which ranges from the southwestern United States through South America, does not fit either of the above categories. Scientists classify it in the genus Parabuteo, meaning similar to Buteo. Hawks belonging to the Parabuteo genus have characteristics of both buteos and accipiters. Harris’s hawks eat small mammals, lizards, snakes, and other birds. They also hunt in groups and can take down birds much larger than themselves and larger mammalian prey than other hawks that hunt alone.  

Osprey

Ospreys, sometimes called fish hawks, sea hawks, or even river hawks, are members of the same order as other hawks, eagles, kites, and vultures. Scientists currently classify the osprey as either a member of the Accipitridae family, with other hawks, or in the Pandionidae family all by itself. Ospreys have an expansive range that circles the globe. Their diet, unlike other types of hawks, consists almost exclusively of fish.

Can Hawks Digest Whole Animals?

Now that you know what different types of hawks eat, you can see that these predators generally consume small animals. Hawks often take time to rip into an animal and devour just the meat. They may leave much of the fur and the large bones behind. But sometimes hawks consume their prey whole. That means they eat fur, feathers, bones, and all. Some of the materials that a hawk eats can be fully digested and the waste will eventually emerge in their poop. Other materials cannot be fully digested. This “casting” material collects in the upper portions of the hawk’s digestive tract before it gets expelled.

Do Hawks Make Pellets Like Owls?

The undigestible casting materials that hawks consume must be eliminated before they move down through the digestive tract. You may have seen owl pellets before. Owls often cough up dry, oval-shaped pellets full of fur and small bones. Hawks do this, too. Hawk pellets differ from owl pellets. The pellets that a hawk produces will have fewer bones than those of an owl, due to differences in their digestive systems.

What Is a Hawk’s Digestive System Like?

A hawk’s digestive system differs significantly from a human’s. Hawks, like many other birds, have a large, muscular pouch called a crop built right into their esophagus. They use the crop to store and begin to break down food that they have recently eaten. Food passes into the stomach slowly, a little at a time, from a hawk’s crop.

Hawks have a two-chambered stomach. The first section, known as the proventriculus, receives food from the crop. There, powerful enzymes begin to break down the food and digest it. The second part, known as the ventriculus or the gizzard, has strong, muscular walls used to mechanically grind and further break down the food. Digestible portions move on to the small intestine, while undigestible materials form a pellet that the hawk expels through its mouth.

Once the digestible portion moves to the small intestine, the hawk’s body absorbs all the nutrients it can and passes on what cannot be used. The ceca, which act much like a mammalian large intestine in some birds, are rudimentary organs or may even be absent in hawks. Waste from the small intestine passes more or less directly into the rectum and then the cloaca, an organ where products from both the digestive tract and the urinary tract are deposited before exiting the body together. Hawks may move material from the cloaca back into the small intestine to absorb more water before expelling the waste. 

What Color Is Hawk Poop?

It may surprise you to learn that the fecal matter of hawks, like that of most animals, is usually brown. Why, then, does the excrement that comes out of hawks usually look white? As mentioned above, hawks have a cloaca at the end of their digestive tract where their feces and the products of their urinary system come together before they get expelled from the body. Birds do not produce urine like humans do. Instead, they produce nitrogenous wastes in the form of a white, sticky substance full of uric acid. This white waste substance coats the feces, so that when a hawk poops, the stuff that comes out of their body just looks white.

If you have ever seen a glob of white bird poop on a bench, or your car, or wherever, you might have noticed that it was mostly white with a bit of black or brown substance near the middle. The colored part of the poop consists of the feces that the bird expelled, and the white part is mostly uric acid.

Sometimes hawks defecate in different colors. When a hawk’s poop comes out green, that typically indicates that it contains quite a bit of unused bile. This happens when the hawk has not eaten in a while, so the bile passes through the digestive system without helping to digest food. Yellowish feces can indicate that the hawk has eaten a meal with an unusually high fat content.

How Do Hawks Poop?

Hawks do not merely poop, they slice. That is what the act of defecation is called when referring to hawks. The poop itself is referred to as a “slicing.” Hawks may defecate from a perch or in flight. When a hawk slices from a perch, it lifts its tail and forcefully expels the contents of its cloaca. The slicing comes out in a long, white string and can fly up to several feet from the hawk’s behind. This act of projectile pooping can be both fascinating and a little bit horrifying to see.

Often, hawks slice while flying. They tend to defecate more often upon takeoff than in the middle of a flight. Getting rid of the contents of their cloaca can help lighten their weight, making it that much easier to fly.

Where Do Baby Hawks Poop?

Even young hawks slice out and away from the nest. As soon as chicks can hop up on the side of the nest and point their behinds outward, they poop as far away from their abode as possible. Because nestling hawks poop out and away from their nest, you may be able to spot a nest from the nearby splatters. Hawks usually nest high in tall trees, or on cliffs, buildings, towers, or other structures. Their nests may be hard to spot from the ground. But a coating of white up high on a wall or a tree, or even on the ground below, can be a telltale sign that hawks are nesting above. Look up and see if you can spot the nest if you see concentrated signs of hawk poop.

Does Hawk Poop Stink?

The fecal matter of many birds surprisingly has little odor. That has a lot to do with their diet, which consists mostly of seeds and fruits. The same cannot be said of hawks. As previously mentioned, the diet of a hawk depends largely on its type, but they all eat meat, fish, or crabs. None of these foods smell particularly good when passed through the digestive system of a hawk, or any other animal for that matter.

Is Hawk Poop Dangerous?

Hawk excrement can contain a wide variety of bacteria. These can include microbes from the Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Escherichia, Campylobacter, and Salmonella genera, as well as others. Hawk poop can also be a source of disease-causing fungi. In other words, yes, hawk poop can be dangerous. You should avoid contact with hawk feces, as well as other animal waste, because the microbes that the poop contains can make you very sick. If you do come into contact with hawk poop, avoid touching your face and wash thoroughly with hot, soapy water. Wash contaminated clothing separately from other laundry.

What Hawk Poop Can Tell You

People who know can tell a lot from looking at a hawk’s poop. The color and content of the excrement can give indications of what the hawk has been eating, as well as the state of its health. Depending on the bird’s recent meals, its poop might be lighter or darker in color. If it has an infection, its poop might be an unusual color, like bright kelly green, yellow, or pink. If it contains a significant amount of black, that may indicate bleeding in the upper digestive tract. Red poop indicates fresh blood and is usually a very bad sign. The consistency of a hawk’s poop can indicate things as well. Poop that is too dry may be a sign of dehydration, while watery poop can be another sign of infection.

In short, a hawk’s poop, like that of pretty much any species, can tell you a lot if you know what signs to look for. You might never come across any of these variations of normal hawk excrement, nor indeed any hawk poop at all if you don’t spend significant time in nature. But if you love these birds of prey, hopefully, you enjoyed learning a bit more about them than you knew before.

The photo featured at the top of this post is © BrianEKushner/iStock via Getty Images